ELLE Film Critic Karen Durbin on Please Give, The Joneses, and more

Two new films, one by a certified queen of indie cinema, the other by a first-timer, put the all-American subjects of family and materialism in front of a fun-house mirror so sharp that we shouldn't be surprised to find our own bent selves in there. Please Give is Nicole Holofcener's fourth movie and her best since the aptly named Lovely & Amazing, while producer Derrick Borte's sleek, smart debut as the writer and director of The Joneses should make the studios take note. In Please Give, Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are expert dealers in high-end furnishings they buy from estate sales, or, as someone remarks, dead people's stuff. Eager to expand the Manhattan apartment they share with their teenage daughter (Sarah Steele), they've bought the one next door but must wait for the cranky old lady who lives there to die—as her granddaughters Rebecca and Mary (Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet) know all too well. In The Joneses, Steve (David Duchovny), yet another Kate (Demi Moore), and their handsome teenagers, Jenn and Mick (Amber Heard and Ben Hollingsworth), are selling nothing less than their lifestyle, which quickly becomes the envy of the upscale suburb they've just moved into. Please Give is the more graceful, subtle film, but The Joneses has some shocks up its designer sleeve that would be a pity to miss.

Most Popular

"Please don't wreck my fun," Alex says in Please Give when his wife steps on a wry story he's telling. Keener's Kate has a knack for wrecking fun, especially her own. Keener, so good at playing women who can barely stand themselves, starred in Holofcener's previous films—Walking and Talking (1996), Lovely & Amazing (2001), and Friends With Money (2006)—thereby attaining muse status, and is in top form here. Kate is racked with guilt at the gulf between her family's affluence and those who have little, but when she looks for volunteer work, nobody wants her. She's so teary and glum, she'd depress the people she's trying to help. Time and again, her guilt makes her hilariously tin-eared, even racist. Walking home after dinner with her husband, she offers her doggie bag to an older black man. Looking at her like she just dropped in from Mars, he points to the restaurant behind him and says drily, "I'm waiting for a table." Small wonder that Alex backs into an affair with another woman, one so brutally dumped by her last lover that she haunts the dress shop of his new girlfriend. Witty though she is, Holofcener doesn't kid around; the inevitable confrontation between the women leaves one of them gutted. As for Alex, even at his most ashamed, Platt imbues him with a gentleness that makes you want to take him home. Holofcener's last comedy of modern manners, Friends With Money, had a surprisingly sour edge. It wrecked my fun, but Please Give feels like the antidote. Cutting to the quick, it still leaves you with a sweetness that feels blessed. Deep down, Please Give is as forgiving and generous as poor Kate would give money to be.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

What earns Borte's satire the right to be called Swiftian is its unnerving premise, an ingenious spin on keeping up with the Joneses. There's something fishy about these Joneses from the start. When the couple next door pays a welcome call, Mom, Dad, and the kids answer the door with arms flung around one another's shoulders in beaming bonhomie. What family does that? The Joneses' secret, shared with the audience, is that they aren't one. They're what the shadowy company they work for (represented by a scarily good Lauren Hutton) calls a "unit"—a team of charismatic hucksters led by Moore's Kate, whose high-paying job, once they get settled, is to sell without ever seeming to, thanks to their considerable charm. They're a Frankenfamily, and everything they have, from Steve's graphite golf clubs to the diamond earrings he gives Kate "just because it's Tuesday," is a luxury item to be discreetly flaunted so that their acquisitive friends and neighbors want one too. Borte has worked out the details of this scheme so cleverly that it's creepily plausible. But then, in a culture where four- and five-figure credit card debt is commonplace, and the government tells its citizens after 9/11 to go out and shop as a patriotic duty, it would be plausible anyway. The creepy part is the way the unit members violate the people around them; there is no community, just a market. Luckily, The Joneses isn't one of those chilly, cynical satires. What warms the movie up and makes its faux family genuinely engaging isn't their powers of persuasion but their messy humanity. One member falls for a first-rate jerk, another reveals a dangerous secret, and two of them start falling for each other. The performances are terrific, from Gary Cole's sad-sack neighbor to Duchovny's relatively innocent newbie. Moore, so brilliant in the heist movie Flawless (2007), stands out once again, as a woman of such complex and conflicted desires that even her driving ambition feels poignant. The Joneses is certainly about desire, but most of all it's about being incessantly cued to want all the wrong things. There's a small, early scene that goes right to the movie's core. While Steve and Kate are throwing their first big party to dazzle the neighborhood, son Mick slips outside to smoke a joint with a girl he's been seeing. As the dope makes him reckless, he says, "Hey, Naomi, you want to know why all those people are in my house right now? It's so my so-called family can show off all their shit." Looking over at him, she says, with a wry smile, "Yeah, it sounds like something my parents would do."

Who better than Bourne (Supremacy and Ultimatum) director Paul Greengrass to turn the Bushies' Big Lie launching of the Iraq War into a heart-pounding thriller? In Green Zone, Matt Damon's WMD-seeking army officer, Amy Ryan's angry, fool-me-once journalist, and Khalid Abdalla's vulnerable translator shine. But the film's real power, besides its terrible clarity, lies in putting us at the hot center of shock and awe. Photo: Jasin Boland/Universal Pictures

What Lies Beneath

Argentine filmmaker Juan José Campanella moonlights as a director on the Law & Order franchises, but The Secret in Their Eyes is so compelling it leaves you hungry for more of his movies. Featuring a veteran criminal investigator doubly haunted by a long-ago love and a vicious rapist-murderer who went free, this soulful, twisty thriller delivers an astonishing jolt before its happy ending. Photo: Maria Antolini